Pages

Things

Twitter

Follow this Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

ChemDraw for iPad mini review

05/06/2013 — martin

So after a very short hands on – I bought it 2 hours ago, here’s is my summary of the new ChemDraw for iPad.

1) Quick and easy to use chemical drawing package

2) Definitely chemistry only – none of the Biodraw features of the desktop are present. All the expected basic rings, bonds elements, a periodic table, Analyse structure feature, Undo function, arrows, R- groups are present in easy to find places. Online help is present.

3) File in/out. Files saved within the app can be emailed out to your friends or your desktop Mac/PC account. The file format is .cdxml. One curious thing I noted was that the exported file I emailed to myself was a 3×2 page file on my Mac, which seemed odd but probably has to do with the screen resolution on the iPad. Anyway I edited on the Mac and emailed it back twice to my iPad mail account, in both .cdx, and .cdxml formats. Both showed up in iOS Mail as the appropriate ChemDraw icons and opened perfectly. The other major touted export function is via their “Flick to Share” feature. This requires you to register to yet another cloud account where you can securely exchange files with other Flick to Share users. I have no colleagues on the system as yet so could not test this feature. You can also transfer Chemdraw files to and from the iPad from within iTunes on your desktop when you’re connected using the Apps pane for your device. They also mention using Dropbox although I have not tested this yet

So all in all a solid first effort from Perkin Elmer. For a 1.0 release I found no nasty bugs, although there was a bit of a fiddle getting out of the help/faq system back into the drawing screen

As for Chem3D for iOS. It seems to be primarily a viewer with similar ways of getting files in and out, plus the ability to retrieve PDB files online via RCSB ID’s. There are many other ways of looking at 3D structures on iOS (e.g. Pymol, Molecules etc) so it will be interesting to see what new features PE bring on board in future updates.

For image only export, from the share menu you can send the file to Dropbox or your camera roll. If you chose to send it to the camera roll it gets saved as a PNG. If you chose to save to Dropbox it will ask you whether you want to save to a PDF, PNG or CDXML file on Dropbox. Obviously the CDXML option is the only one which gives you something you can edit on the desktop version. If you save to your camera roll you can upload the PNG from there to wherever you want. I use the Dropbox app for that purpose but I’m sure other cloudshare options exist. Direct from the camera you have the option of Facebook, Twitter and Flickr as well but I’ve not used those. Presumably too if you have iCloud auto photo synch turned on they’ll end up there as well. I also haven’t used the Flick-2-share option much either but that sends cdxml